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Record W4403924100 · doi:10.1093/ccc/tcae042

Controlled connection: Substack and writers of color

2024· article· en· W4403924100 on OpenAlex
Nelanthi Hewa, Nicole S. Cohen

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueCommunication Culture and Critique · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLiterature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersAssociation for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
KeywordsConnection (principal bundle)MathematicsGeometry

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Substack, a self-described “subscription network for independent writers and creators,” launched in 2017. Substack claims to be part of a better future for news workers, yet it has been embroiled in controversy and questions, particularly in recent years. In this article, we draw on interviews we conducted with journalists and writers of color who produce newsletters to better understand the opportunities and limitations of contemporary newsletter platforms. We find that studying the experiences of journalists of color reveals a nuanced and somewhat ambivalent picture of the journalism industry and people of color’s place within it. We find that the Substack models favors the status quo, a reality that further entrenches the success of White journalists. Yet writers of color value the safety enabled by sending writing directly to a small, defined, private audience, a contrast with social media logics and their compulsory visibility.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.951
Threshold uncertainty score0.386

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.265
Teacher spread0.248 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it